Pages

Monday, 24 July 2017

When I first disclosed my abuse in 2012 I discovered, late in the day I have to admit, Linkin Park. Now I love music, and I've blogged about music before, but my usual go to pieces didn't cut it. I was raw, I was angry, and I needed music to say the things I couldn't say.

My ears would bleed listening to "Numb" as loud as I could. Chester Bennington's voice could go from sounding like an innocent, angelic child to a roaring beast within 20 seconds, and that's how I felt. The rage in my heart was so strong, it was terrifying, and Linkin Park gave that voice an outlet.

This weekend I walked along the beach listening to song after song. And I waited for that moment, the finding of peace, the song that voiced a turning point. But no, every song is filled with torment, with disappointment, with impending doom.

I am not a follower of celebrity and I had no idea that Chester was abused as a child. I have seen articles describe Chester's life as a classic study of child sexual abuse.

I rally against this. Chester's life was his own. He made it count, and how. Filling stadiums, selling countless albums, giving the voiceless a voice. I don't know why Chester decided his life was to come to an end. No one does. No one knows if it's as a direct result of the abuse he suffered as a child.

How is my life different to Chester's? How am I different? Is there any point keeping on going with the daily struggle of dealing with the shit left behind by my own childhood experiences. As the evil voice that plagues me from time to time has said over and over this weekend "you should be dead, you can't beat this, if Chester couldn't then you are doomed".

That powerful voice has no place in my head. I've drowned it with music all my life and this weekend was no different.

There is inexplicable joy in my life from so many sources, my family, my beautiful son, from the things around me, the things I create, the love that surrounds me. Yes at times I feel numb, I feel like in the end it doesn't really matter. I long, as Chester sung, for somewhere I belong.

Sometimes I still feel like an outsider, or a little child. But you know what, we all do, regardless of our histories.

Life is a valuable thing, but I can understand when someone decides that they can't do this anymore. Success, family, love, adoration, nothing can save them.

I feel desperately saved that in the end, he couldn't be saved, and can only hope that he has found peace, comfort and somewhere to belong.

And maybe that's the difference. In the end, after all I've done, I don't believe the answer is to erase myself. I believe the love of my family, my friends, of all those who have touched me in my life, is enough. I face this every day, gaining a deeper understanding of myself, a greater self compassion.

I'll miss you Chester. You will never know how much your lyrics and performances meant to me. I am sorry that it wasn't enough. That we weren't enough.

Friday, 10 March 2017

I have recently finished reading Eating the Elephant by Alice Wells. I approached this book with trepidation, her story is disturbing and compelling, and beautifully written and constructed, which helps enormously to digest the content. Her journey of discovering the vile world her husband assisted to perpetuate, using his own very small daughter to do so, is unspeakably horrific. He died before she was able to confront him.

Slowly it unfolds that he took hundreds of photos of his daughter and subjected her to abuse, very similar to my own experiences, although I hasten to add I was not abused by a family member. I found the story of her daughter to be so comforting and helped me understand myself as a child that little bit better.

Alice, in the book, and in an interview I saw with her, describes her life before the death of her husband, that she was permanently distracted. We learn in mindfulness class that autopilot and distraction are the enemies to fully living, to fully live we must be fully present, and the same in parenting. To truly parent you must be present.

Modern life is hard, together with the regular pressures of feeding your child and keeping a roof over their head are so many demands. Holidays, toys, experiences, education all this stuff requires paying for. We need to work. We want jobs that are meaningful, that use our skills and capabilities. We need to be out of the house very often in order to do this, perhaps we have long commutes. We may have older relatives that need our time too, friendships that need nurturing and in all this we need our own play time and releases too.

Distraction is where potential child sexual abusers (PSAs) can flourish. Allow me to take a step back at this point.

When I first entered therapy for child sexual abuse in 2012 at the age of 40 one of the sessions was around why I was chosen to be abused. I felt sick at the thought. I genuinely thought that we were going to look at me, and what was it about me that made him want to abuse me.

A PSA requires two things to be successful. Firstly they require the desire to abuse a child. That desire pre exists, which is important to remember. It is nothing about the child, a normal person doesn’t see a child and suddenly have the desire to abuse, their desire is there already. It is never the child’s fault.

Secondly, that PSA requires access. The child needs to be accessible to abuse. Being a distracted parent gives a PSA potential access to the child.

What we need to consider here is what is being present? Being present is not the same as being there. You can be next to your child and not be present. Being present covers many bases. Do you know who your child’s friends are? Do you know their parents? Do you understand your child’s normal patterns? Do you understand the games that they play, the apps they use? Do you take a genuine interest in what they do? Would you recognise a change in behaviour? Would you know how to respond?

Being present also means being approachable. There is a sickening scene in Eating the Elephant where Alice recalls her daughter disclosing, prior to the death of her father and the subsequent discoveries, and Alice inadvertently shuts her down. She is repulsed by what Alice says, and changes the subject. At no time did she consider that Alice might have first hand experience of what she mentioned. I don’t blame Alice and there is a discussion in the book about how this came to be, that Alice, a trained doctor, missed a key disclosure.

A present parent is a paedophile’s worst nightmare and your best defence. You cannot wrap your child up and protect them from evil. You don’t teach your child the statistics about car travel. You don’t make them feel fearful every time they step into a car that they could be in an accident, that there are drunk and drugged drivers on the roads, people without licences, over tired truck drivers, busy motorways, boy racers, the list goes on.

Which brings me to the internet. Our children are growing up in a digital world. It is essential that you understand this world. I saw an article the other day about a parent horrified about Roblox and their child receiving messages. Joseph plays Roblox, however he does not have an account, he has to play as a guest, and even then Roblox has some issues. One day I was horrified to see Joseph making a hockey mask and talking about Jason. I had to Google to find out what this was all about, I had never watched a horror movie, and still haven’t, and it took some time to unravel all this from Joseph’s mind.

It’s easy to become distracted and lose track of your child in an online wormhole. As children get older and learn to cover their tracks it’s even harder to keep an eye on what they are doing and who they are talking to.

On Facebook many of my friends shared this video made by Leicestershire Police about Kayleigh, a true and highly distressing story.

What this brought to my mind is what if she had spoken to her parents. Are parents equipped to have a conversation about concerns regarding online behaviour. I’m not sure I would have known what to say if Kayleigh had come to me and told me she had met a boy online. I like to think I would have been open, encouraged discussion, and engaged with her over it. Or maybe I would have completely lost my shit and forced Kayleigh deeper into the arms of this monster. I don’t know.

To ride safely in a car you need the right seats, the correct seatbelts, you need a car in good working order. You need knowledge, about yourself, your own capabilities, your vehicle, the roads around you and an awareness of other road users. Not just other vehicles but pedestrians, animals, wildlife, changing road conditions etc.

So too with the internet. Driving can be highly pleasurable, as can internet usage. I love the internet and it has enriched my life in many ways. But I am an adult, even so I have made mistakes online, and no doubt Joseph will make more along the way. But by being present and connected I can help him make sense of the digital world, and he can help me make sense of his world too.

Being fearful of PSAs is the worst thing you can do. Fear can lead to distraction. Being knowledgeable, confident and present is the best thing you can do to protect your child from harm.

To be able to tackle an elephant you first need to know that it is there.

Tuesday, 7 March 2017

Entering Bangkok airport I feel into my bag. I feel again. I lurch my hand into the pocket in my rucksack. It was there this morning now it’s gone. I go to a bench, travellers everywhere, the airport a symphony of conversations, and I rifle through my bag. Not only my passport but my wallet has evaporated out of my bag.

I have lost my money, my credit cards, my picture of my son, my identity. My identity. How do I prove who I am?

The above isn’t true. I have never been to Bangkok sadly, although it is on the list, I haven’t stood in any of the world’s airports rifling through my bag desperately searching for my documents proving who I am.

I have, however, been in a frightfully busy accident and emergency department falling to pieces in the waiting room desperately in search of my identity. In the height of 3 month long mental health crisis I lost my passport. That thing in your brain that makes you you. I lost my personality.

It seems inconceivable that a personality can just go missing. Passports make a lot more sense. They are small, slippery, covetable. A desperate person can steal it in order to create a new identity, to conduct criminal activity, to escape a life of misery and obtain a new one.

I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I quite literally felt like I was in a movie watching someone else. I could feel myself sitting on the ceiling watching this woman in obvious distress crumble beneath me and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. The NHS response? Put me in a locked ward as a voluntary patient.

There I was met with kindness and compassion. A nurse gave me a pile of Mind printouts about dissociative disorders and depersonalisation. I had no idea. I had lost my personality and dissociated from myself.

I was sitting in the communal room with this pile of paperwork on dealing with distress wondering how to get my personality back.

I only needed to be in hospital 3 days. Whilst losing one’s personality is distressing it isn’t a mental illness. It’s a psychological one. No support, no medication, an unceremonious discharge back into the “community”.

I sat at home for weeks on end only leaving for essential trips. I lost my job. Having a job is a key part of having identity. I lost my relationships with several friends as I couldn’t relate to them as I had lost the thing that makes me me.

I could barely relate to my mother who travelled all the way from Tasmania as I needed her, but I didn’t know her because I wasn’t me. I was like an empty vessel of memories but with no identity. The only part of my identity I retained was that of mother. Joseph, as always, my anchor.

I remained under psychiatry for a time but the answer wasn’t there. I didn’t fit their categories. I wasn’t in psychosis, I didn’t have bipolar, I wasn’t schizophrenic, I wasn’t depressed. I couldn’t be depressed as I didn’t have a personality to be depressed.

I did some research and together with the psychiatrist the finding was that there was something wrong with me due to childhood trauma. So I made the brave decision to unpack it.

I finally got a brilliant psychologist and I set to work with the brilliant book Breaking Free and dissected my childhood bit by bit.

I had to shelve the bits that made me me when I was being abused. I couldn’t be there for that, it was too painful, too frightening. I used to sit on the ceiling and watch this monster devour the object beneath me, but it wasn’t me so it didn’t hurt.

Until child abuse hit the news, I could be completely objective about what had happened to me. It was seeing other people distressed about what had happened to them and feeling upset for them that made me realise that actually I had to be upset for what had happened to me. I had to grieve for the childhood that had been damaged by the monster.

I went to see a police officer locally and as I calmly explained what had happened to me his colour went white and he swallowed as if he had been sick. Actually, the stuff I deemed to be minor would get 7+ years in this country. This was serious. I had been abused for years by a monster. That took some getting used to.

I realised to get my personality back I had to stop being a survivor. I had to become a victim. This sounds counterintuitive. It was a dear friend in Australia who shared a piece by a doctor talking about his patients with chronic illnesses that wouldn’t get better as they wouldn’t rest, take their treatments and allow them to work. They insisted on being well people when actually they were sick.

To be a survivor you first have to be a victim. The process of acknowledging what had happened to that girl, allowing me to remember, to feel sick, to feel afraid, to be repulsed was the key to getting better. To realise that my parents had been totally unaware, that they weren’t to blame. To realise that safeguarding procedures, such as they were decades ago, completely failed me.

I had to be a victim and it was horrible. I have always identified as a survivor and a fighter, but that is what did me in, albeit temporarily.

Slowly I pieced together the things that made me me. My positivity, my kindness, my ability to talk to people and make them feel better about themselves and their situation, my creativity and my daftness. All the things that had been under the spotlight as possible symptoms of a psychiatric disorder were just the bits of me, that in isolation appeared weird but in the package of my personality completely fit.

I will never forget the brutality of being admitted into hospital, the first admission I had was so frightening that it deserves a post of its own, however that second admission brought me to a place of healing, of self acceptance and to realising what I had lost.

I’m not entirely sure it has completely returned yet, but bit by bit I am coming back into myself to be the person I was created to be.